The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for providing biology based techniques for handling information security and privacy.
Correspondence between biological diseases and computer-based problems has been remarked upon for several decades. There has been much attention paid to computer viruses, which has spawned an entire field of “computer immunology”. For example, in his paper “Computer Immunology,” Proceedings of the Twelfth Systems Administration Conference (LISA '98), Dec. 6-11, 1998, Mark Burgess commented on the fragile nature of modern computer systems and their unreliability as well as the comparability of biological and social systems with computer systems such that, similar to such biological and social systems, computing systems need self-healing processes which eliminate or minimize the dependence on human involvement.
Stephanie Forrest, Steven Hofmeyr, and Anil Somayaji described, in their paper entitled “Computer Immunology,” Department of Computer Science, University of New Mexico, Mar. 21, 1996, the correspondence between biological systems and computing systems and that this correspondence is a compelling reason to consider for improving computer security. In another publication also entitled “Computer Immunology,” Department of Computer Science, University of New Mexico, Oct. 29, 2006, Stephanie Forrest and Catherine Beauchemin describe a body of work that constructs computational immune systems that behave analogously to the natural immune system. These artificial immune systems (AIS) simulate the behavior of a natural immune system and, in some cases, have been used to solve practical engineering problems, such as computer security.